‘It’s Mitch. Mitch Reynolds.’
Mitch. It was perfect. The Reynolds part she had assumed but the rest of his name suited him perfectly. It was strong, straightforward and honest. He had an honest face and an honest name. He seemed like the type of man who could be trusted. He would call a spade a spade.
He put out his hand but Rose hesitated. She’d been thinking about him all night but even so her reaction to him today had surprised her. She was almost afraid to touch him again, afraid of what she would feel, afraid her body would betray her and he would be able to read on her face all the conflicting emotions that were coursing through her. Part of her wanted to see if she experienced the same sensation again but she knew she had to prepare herself first. If she was flustered she didn’t want him to see. She needed to appear in control.
Almost against her better judgement she put her hand in his. His fingers closed around hers, his grip strong but not threatening, and Rose had the strangest sensation of familiarity, that her body already knew his touch. It certainly responded to it as though she’d had some knowledge, some experience, of him before.
‘So now that we’re no longer strangers, will you let me buy you a coffee? I wanted to talk to you about Lila.’
He had sounded so guilty about forgetting Lila’s things; he’d sounded like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders and Rose couldn’t deny she was desperate to know more. This could be her chance to find out.
She nodded, not trusting herself to speak. She didn’t want him to guess how he affected her and she suspected her voice would be high and quavering. That was not the way to appear in control.
‘The social worker stopped by the ward after you left yesterday,’ Mitch said as he placed the cafeteria tray on the table and handed her a coffee. ‘Did you have anything to do with that?’
Rose knew that the social worker had been trying to contact Lila’s parents but she’d had nothing to do with the visit. She shook her head. ‘No. I imagine she’d left instructions with the nurses to call her when you got here.’ She took a bite of the doughnut that Mitch had insisted on buying for her and asked, ‘Who came to see you?’
‘Annabel.’
‘What did she want?’
‘She wanted to find out about Lila. Something about hospital policy for children who have no family support. Lila has family support, but I can’t be in two places at once.’
Mitch didn’t wear a wedding ring. She already knew that. She’d checked. She’d also done a little investigating yesterday after she’d left Lila’s bedside and discovered that there didn’t appear to be a Mrs Reynolds. Was that why Mitch needed to be in two places at once?
But surely Lila had a mother? She must have one. Rose wondered where she was. Wild horses wouldn’t have kept her away from her own child if they’d been hospitalised and she thought it odd that she hadn’t come to town, even if she wasn’t part of Mitch’s life any more.
If she wanted to know the answers, she would have to ask the questions. ‘What about Lila’s mother? Where is she?’
‘My wife died, there’s only me.’
‘Oh.’ That wasn’t the answer she’d been expecting. Surely that was the sort of information that should have been passed on to her? But before she could say anything further, Mitch kept talking.
‘So, if you’re not part of the social work team, what is it that you do here?’
Obviously his wife, his dead wife, was not a topic that was up for discussion.
‘I’m a teacher,’ Rose replied, going with the subject change.
‘A teacher?’ Mitch queried. ‘The social worker mentioned educational support... Are you what she was talking about?’
Rose smiled. His phrasing wasn’t quite the way she would have put it. ‘Yes, but not just me. We have a school here.’
‘In the hospital?’
She nodded. ‘Children who will have long hospital stays or frequent admissions, thereby missing school, can attend classes in the hospital. It stops them from getting too far behind and also keeps them socialising. We have a lot of kids, like Lila, from the country, and being away from family can be quite isolating. I imagine Annabel thinks Lila would benefit from attending classes.’ Rose knew that was the case but she got the impression that Mitch wouldn’t want to know the staff had been discussing him. She suspected he would want to feel like the idea and the decision to enrol Lila in the hospital school was his. ‘I teach middle primary mainly.’
‘So you would teach Lila?’
Rose nodded.
‘How does it work? School of the air I’m familiar with, but that’s about it for schools out our way.’
‘We have several teachers on staff covering everything from kindergarten through to high school and we have several classrooms. If children can make it to the classrooms they attend there but we can also teach them in their beds.’
‘And Lila can join in?’
‘Yes. Any child who is going to be in hospital for longer than a couple of days or is admitted frequently can be enrolled and we work closely with their regular school to make sure what they are learning is relevant.’
‘Why is this the first I’m hearing about this?’
Rose smiled. ‘I would guess Annabel has been trying to tell you, and if you’d called her back you would know.’
‘Touché,’ he said, before taking another sip of his coffee. ‘Lila would probably enjoy being in a classroom and having other kids her age around instead of just her younger brothers. How do I organise this?’
‘You’ll have to email Annabel and she can put a request in on your behalf,’ Rose explained.
Mitch pulled out his phone, asked for Annabel’s email address, and sent an email off straight away. He copied Rose in to the email and her phone beeped as the email hit her inbox. She glanced at her screen. Mitch’s signature on the bottom of the email included the contact details for the station.
Emu Downs.
It sounded so romantic. ‘Emu Downs. That’s a beautiful name.’
Mitch smiled and Rose’s heart soared. It was crazy how she reacted to his simple gestures. She’d spent months telling herself she wasn’t ready for a relationship yet this man, virtually a complete stranger, was able to make her body spring to life.
‘You’re imagining huge mobs of emus running across the land, aren’t you?’ Mitch’s question interrupted her fantasy.
Emus? She hadn’t been imagining anything of the sort! But she couldn’t tell him the truth—that she was feeling such a strong pull of attraction that she was amazed he hadn’t noticed. She couldn’t tell him the truth so she fibbed. ‘I was. Are there lots?’
‘Not any more. The dingoes and the drought have wiped a lot of them out.’
‘It’s a cattle station, is that right?’
Mitch nodded.
‘Has it always been in your family?’
‘It belongs to my wife’s family.’
The dead wife. That brought her back down to earth with a thump. This man with the gorgeous eyes and kind smile had children and a dead wife. He ran a cattle station out back of nowhere and he’d told her he had a lot on his plate. Hooking up with a random girl was probably not high on his agenda.
But Rose couldn’t shake the feeling that fate had brought him to her. That they were supposed to meet, that there was something between them and that he was going to be important